The Initial Meeting
Fully understanding a person’s financial needs is a process we feel requires human interaction which helps shed the right light on a situation. When it comes to matters of your investments and planning for your future, having a professional who has taken the time to get to know you, may offer questions and thoughts no on-line questionnaire could possibly address.
We encourage our first step to be a direct meeting, in person if possible. The initial meeting gives us a chance to connect with you. We would like to fully understand what are the crossroads you see ahead, and establish if a relationship together will be a good fit. There are times when our services may not be the best plan of action for you yet and we do have referral partners for resources to extend to you. This initial consultation is free of charge.
Data and Planning Review
Now that we have reached an agreement in working together, we need to clearly outline and address the objectives at hand as well as the future. We will need to gather some data including statements and other documents during this process to be able to answer your questions and create a more detailed plan.
Many of the hours spent in doing our work is in the planning and review area. Once we have had our initial meetings and established an agreement on how we will work together, we collect our data and get to work. This process can take at times a few weeks as we will evaluate, ask questions, and have meetings with other professionals specialized in areas needed.
Strategy Meeting
In these meetings we share with you the potential courses of action we feel are the best possible choices for your objectives. There may be a few choices which stand out among others, as there will always be different ideas to pursue similar results. These meetings are designed to establish an agreement between the client and the advisor on which strategy will be used to meet your needs.
Strategy Implementation
Having a strategy is most effective when it is used. You will be given a customized written Executive Summary discussing our plan of action. Having a plan is just one step. Implementing the plan takes our work together and establishes
action for it. Opening accounts, submitting transfers, making referrals for estate planning, tax work, or other related task items needed to complete the planning objectives is all part of implementation. Implementation may also
be done in stages as there may be items which cannot be addressed immediately. These could be issues with proprietary products, surrender fees, cost basis concerns, or tax ramifications.
Revise and Review
No financial plan is designed to just sit on a shelf gathering dust. These are active documents and as the financial world around you changes, so can the plan. We must therefore set standard review periods and benchmarks. The objective is to keep us on track together. We also use this time to schedule out the next quarters of meetings and related objectives. Of course, situations may occur in between these periods and could require a meeting. As life changes can happen at any time, having regular active communication between us allows many potential situations to already have a contingency plan in place.